Friday, January 20, 2017

Trump Will Make Us Wealthy Again?

I’m not alone in finding Trump’s speech incredibly disappointing. But there was one sentence that just struck me as beyond odd:

We Will Make America Wealthy Again.

Was the nation in the aggregate ever wealthier? I had to wonder and checked here. The $90.196 trillion is aggregate nominal household net wealth for the 3rd quarter of 2016 and cannot be compared to previous periods without two adjustments. Back in the 2nd quarter of 2007 was $67.705 but the GDP price index had risen by 14.87% over this period. So in real terms (2007QII = 1), real aggregate household net wealth had risen by around 16% to $78.52 trillion. And while we had only 301.7 million people back in 2007, population had risen to 324.6 million by the 3rd quarter of last year. So real wealth per capita was $224,412 back in 2007, it was recently $241,898 recently. In other words, real wealth per capita is 7.8% higher than it was in 2007. And yes I realize that the distribution of wealth was very uneven back in 2007 and in many ways got worse since then. But does anyone believe that this Republican Administration and Congress think for a moment that they intend to redistribute either income or wealth to the average Joe?